In today’s market multiple “stand-alone” financial planning and consolidation solutions exist and are offered as both on-premise and cloud based solutions. These stand-alone solutions very much focus on and facilitate the concepts of flexibility (planning applications being easily adapted or changed) and ownership by the business with limited support from IT. The SAP BPC standard model is specifically designed to support these concepts. The offset however is that these solutions do require periodic replication of transactional, master and related meta-data in multiple locations which in turn can give rise to various potential issues including risk of data inconsistencies, data latency and use of resources on non-value add activities such as manual replication, reconciliation, managing data movements and investigation of inconsistencies/variances.

Not all planning and consolidation scenarios necessarily require high flexibility and ownership by the business however. The is particularly true where an Enterprise is rolling out a standard centrally administered and fairly static application across the corporation. For these scenarios a more unified solution with no or significantly reduced data replication, significantly reducing the issues noted above, may be more applicable. With the introduction of the embedded model to “complement” the existing standard model SAP now offers up an alternative modeling option designed to address such scenarios.

In the following blogs of this series we will give you more insight into the specific use cases for the “embedded model” type and how for example the embedded model has been used to achieve real time integration with SAP’s new S/4HANA applications eliminating the need for data replication. As well for customers who have already implemented BW-IP we will look at the unique reasons for moving to BPC on the embedded model.